Al Cardenas: Romney's lackluster outreach to minorities

November 20, 2012|By Al Cardenas

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney collected far more resources and contacted far more voters than any Republican presidential candidate in history. Millions more registered to vote between 2008 and 2012; yet Gov. Romney received about 800,000 fewer votes nationally than Sen. John McCain in 2008.

And, this was at a time when President Obama did not yet have a record, and the country had only begun to face the meanest financial meltdown in our country's history, blamed primarily on Republicans.

In turn, President Obama also received fewer votes — about 7 million —in 2012 than he had in 2008. Republicans were poised to win the presidency if only the projected GOP and Romney turnout had indeed shown up. They didn't. Why?

Mitt Romney is a successful businessman, with a beautiful family and whose best skill sets are ideally suited to fix the economic woes we face as a nation. The Obama campaign strategy had a great ground game, but they didn't really win this. We lost it.

Even according to all of the exit polls, most of the blame for our current financial situation lay on the current president, not on the Congress or former President George W. Bush.

The real story for the loss is simple but fixing it will be hard.

The demographics of the country have changed and the new majority-in-waiting does not care for the GOP brand. Our polling indeed gave us confidence that we could compete, especially in the Latino community, without changing our values.

Mitt Romney united conservatives and center-right supporters eager to defeat President Obama. The majority of independents even supported Romney as well. No presidential candidate in recent history had received a higher percentage of the white vote than did Mitt Romney.

But, unlike all previous elections, in 2012 minorities turned out at equal or higher numbers than did whites. While 87 percent of all voters were white in 1980 when Reagan won, in 2012, they only represented 72 percent of all voters.

By the time Mitt Romney received his party's nomination, the GOP was a damaged brand beyond repair within the black, Latino and Asian-American communities, where the "floor" of support had shrunk to new lows.

In retrospect, perhaps the most significant question polled during the general election was: "does candidate X care for people like me?" Gov. Romney's numbers with the minority electorate were most troublesome, and, as it turned out, decisive.

This was based on an inherited damaged GOP brand, a successful negative effort by the Obama campaign to portray him as not caring for these communities, and a lackluster minority outreach effort by the Romney campaign. It's clear that the high turnout and huge margins among minorities were the real reason for this loss.

The challenge for the GOP will continue to be more difficult each election cycle and the work ahead is steeply uphill — but essential — if we are going to be in a position to compete for the White House in 2016.

But it can be done, as former Gov. Jeb Bush and the GOP proved during Bush's eight years in office in Florida. A similar effort needs to take place on a national scale, undertaken by party leaders who "get it."

If these trends don't turn around quickly, we are history.

Al Cardenas is chairman of American Conservative Union and former chairman, Republican Party of Florida.